Darby couldn’t believe it. It felt like a hallucination. She blinked, afraid it would all disperse like a dream, but the letters were all still there, trembling in her numb hands. Her text had successfully sent at 3:56 a.m. She’d received the 9-1-1 dispatcher’s response at 3:58 a.m. Just minutes ago.
Oh, thank God, the cops will be here in thirty minutes— Her chest swelled with gulped breaths. Nervous electricity in her bones. She had questions. Tons of them. For starters, she didn’t know how this reconciled with CDOT’s snowplow situation — were the plows due in thirty minutes, too? Were they due first? Were they all charging up Backbone Pass at once — cops and road crews — as one big convoy? She didn’t know, and truthfully, she didn’t care, as long as the cops got here and shot Ashley Garver in his smirking face.
“Oh, Jay,” she whispered. “I could kiss you—”
The girl’s voice pitched: “Darby, stop.”
“What?”
Jay faced her now, standing in the curved glare of the Ford’s headlights. Staring with snowflakes collecting on her shoulders, alarmingly still.
Darby tried to keep her voice calm. “Jay, I don’t understand—”
“Don’t move.”
“What is it?”
She whispered: “He’s behind you.”
*
Ashley was just tugging the Paslode’s trigger, preparing to spear a 16-penny into the back of her skull, when Darby turned to face him.
Her auburn bangs feathered off her cheekbone as she spun, her eyes coming around and up to find him. Catching a slash of moonlight, her skin marshmallow-soft. That white scar still invisible — unless she squinted or smiled. Like a an actress hitting her mark, a gentle flourish framed by a cinematographer’s eye, the way Eva Green greets Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.
Just a turn.
But Christ, what a turn.
Under Darby’s jacket and jeans, he could locate the luxurious shapes of her body. Her shoulders. Her hips. Her breasts. He wished he could print this moment, this snapshot of heartbreaking beauty, and keep it forever. Like all the truest art, you’re never quite sure how it makes you feel at first, until you untangle your feelings later. And he’d have plenty to untangle. He wished it could just be something simple, like lust, because lust can be satiated with Pornhub — but ever since he’d kissed her in that grungy restroom, his feelings for Darby had become knottier and more complex than that.
“Hi, Darbs.” He forced a smile. “Long night, huh?”
She said nothing.
No fear in those eyes. Not even a tremor.
She just looked him up and down, assessing him, like this CU-Boulder redhead had somehow already anticipated this encounter, hours ago, and had a contingency plan prepared, which was of course impossible. Tonight had been a swirling, sweaty shitstorm of blind chance and left-field surprises. Not even a magic man like Ashley himself could stay on top of everything all the time.
But still, he thought, I wish you hadn’t turned around.
It makes this harder.
He raised the cordless nailer again. He depressed the Paslode’s muzzle with his left palm, tricking the safety, squeezing the two-stage trigger, drawing careful aim on her left eye— Darby didn’t flinch. “That’d be a mistake.”
“What?”
“You don’t want to kill me.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“I hid your keychain,” she said. “I know where your Astro keys are, and if you kill me now, you’ll never find them. Now that Sandi’s truck is stuck here, and you shot up my Honda, you’ve trapped yourself here. That van is the only way you and your brother will ever escape this rest stop tonight.”
Silence.
She raised her hands, like a mic drop.
And from the front of Sandi’s truck, Ashley heard a strange, scraping chitter. A sound he’d never heard before.
It was Jay laughing.
4:05 a.m.
Thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes.
Survive the next thirty minutes, until the cops get here.
This repeated in her mind on the walk back to the rest area. Ashley had ordered her to walk in front, with Jay at her side, while he held the nail gun to their backs. He also carried her iPhone.
He’d snatched it from Darby’s hand before she could delete 9-1-1’s text message. He swiped through it now, the screen illuminating the snow a spectral blue as they walked, and she quietly braced for Ashley Garver’s apocalyptic reaction when he learned the truth — that the cops were incoming at this very second.
But nothing happened. They walked in silence. She heard him lick his lips, adjusting his grip on the nail gun as he scrolled through her phone, and she realized — he’s not reading my texts.
The possibility of Darby texting the police hadn’t occurred to him. He was only scanning her call records, searching for successful voice calls to 9-1-1. Which, of course, she’d already tried, dozens of times, back at 9 and 10 p.m. He was scrolling through them, inspecting the timestamps.
“Call failed,” he read. “Call failed. Call failed. Call failed—”
You have no idea. She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t.
You’re holding it in your hand.
“Good, good.” He sounded like he was relaxing.
She squeezed Jay’s unhurt hand, lowering her voice. “Don’t be afraid. He can’t kill me, because I know where his keys are—”
“That’s true, Darbs,” Ashley interjected. “But I can hurt you.”
Yeah? She wanted to say. You have half an hour, asshole.
She desperately hoped thirty minutes was a realistic estimate for when the police would arrive here, and not just a dispatcher’s wild guess. Between the jackknifed semi and the blizzard, there were a lot of possible complications that might not be visible from an alert desk inside a warm sheriff’s station somewhere. What if it wasn’t thirty minutes, but forty? An hour? Two hours?
Ashley groped her as she walked. The nail gun prodding her backbone, his fingers exploring her pockets, front and back. Her legs. The sleeves of her hoodie. “Just making sure,” he breathed down her neck.
He’d been searching for his keys.
The only thing keeping me alive right now is that stupid keychain. She imagined those keys now, resting in the snow outside the restroom window where they’d landed. Slowly vanishing, one snowflake at a time.
“You should just tell me now what you did with them,” he whispered. “It’ll be so much easier for both of us.”
For a long moment as they walked, Darby didn’t quite grasp what he meant by that. Then the realization came to her slowly, like a great shape emerging from the depths, taking monstrous form.
When they got back inside the visitor center, Ashley was going to torture her. This was a certainty. He would give her a yellow card, or a red card, or worse, until she confessed the keychain’s location. And the second she did, he’d kill her. She felt her heartbeat hitch in her chest, like a trapped animal. She considered running, but he’d just nail-gun her in the back. And he was far too strong to fight.